The Wintrish girl by Melanie La'Brooy

The Wintrish girl offers high interest level and literary value to Middle School readers. It represents the best of fantasy adventure writing. Move over Harry Potter! We have our own Australian fantasy writer now, Melanie La’Brooy, with The Wintrish girl being her first novel for children.

In La’Brooy we are treated to a writer who draws from a depth of worldly and otherworldly knowledge gained from parents who gave her “a childhood overflowing with books…” and from experience drawn from living in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Evidence is in the allusions to creatures that may have been inspired by the myths, folk and fairy tales of multiple cultures. There is a plethora of mysterious talismans, unexpected realms, loopholes, “Eminent Marvels,” royalty, Night Hags, princesses and much more in The Wintrish girl.

In addition to the magical strangeness of the characters, settings and events is an obvious joy in the use of language. La’Brooy is a self-confessed word nerd and editor.  Her writing plays out, in its energy and vitality, as a vital demonstration of good literature and a celebration of things that count for something - like libraries, librarians, clever kids, sharp thinking, courage in the face of fear and precision in the use of language.  Clever word play dances through every description and piece of dialogue. We have “Malevolence” and “Malevolents” and “Marvelance” and “Marvellous”. We have the panthera (altogether much scarier than a panther). “When will people learn that precision in language counts for something?” (Portentia p. 328).

The core of the book could be when Arthur explains why he and his friends are a threat to the Arylians (p. 343) …  “Because we’re different. And if there’s another way of being, then their way isn’t the only way. If there even is such a thing.” A commentary on our times may be within Portentia’s statement… that “The Sword of Destiny is no guarantee that boy will become mighty warrior… both Warriors and Kings must make their own destiny… time passed, and illiteracy and ignorance came into fashion…” (p.329)

The Empire of Arylia is divided into distinctively different realms each severed from the other by impenetrable barriers. Loopholes are found by accident and through magical means. Evil has to be overcome. Our heroes, each different and outcast, form a crew as they face dangerous enemies and discover their separate abilities. The settings and action sequences are cinematic and freshly imaginative. Could a film-maker recreate the escape in dragon’s eggshells down molten rivers of lava, smacked on the way by a Laviathon’s tail or the slow-moving maze of teetering books, precisely “organized according to the Hypatian system, which is based on the mathematical system that all knowledge leads back to the One” in the Librarynth?

Penn, Arthur and Juniper are our thoroughly likeable and courageous heroes. They are, in this book, only just beginning to find that they have talismans and learning about their individual powers. La’Brooy has the reader hanging on the edge of their seat throughout the action-packed The Wintrish girl (Talismans of fate book one)

Readers will impatiently await The Wintrish Girl (Talismans of fate Book Two). Teacher's notes are available.

Highly recommended.

Themes: Fantasy, Talismans, Belonging, Friendship, Identity, Adventure.

Wendy Jeffrey